Posted
by
Unknown Lameron Wednesday January 15, 2014 @11:30AM
from the will-no-one-think-about-cyberdog dept.

An anonymous reader writes with this quick bite from Info Q: "Oracle is seeking feedback from the Java community about what it should work on for the next version of Java EE, the popular and widely used enterprise framework. As well as standardizing APIs for PaaS and SaaS the vendor is looking at removing some legacy baggage including EJB 2.x remote and local client view (EJBObject, EJBLocalObject, EJBHome, and EJBLocalHome interfaces) and CORBA."

Download and install the open-source JDK 7 for most popular Linux distributions. If you came here looking for Oracle JDK 7 product binaries for Solaris, Linux, Mac OS X or Windows, which are based largely on the same code, you can download them from java.oracle.com.

Oracle has a strangle-hold on the language, even on the front of OpenJDK's website it tells you to download binaries from Oracle.

You haven't heard? A few months ago Larry Ellison had Bjarne Stroustrup kidnapped. He's holding him hostage on his America's Cup boat somewhere in international waters. If ISO and IEC don't do what he says, Struostrup joins Wilson...

Yeah, Java and MySQL has seen better times - both platforms have recieved similar criticisms with regards to patching security issues. I don't much care if the world stops using Java, but the MySQL situation breaks my heart. On to MariaDB.

You might want to look at http://www.postgresql.org/ [postgresql.org] - I've done at least 5 intensive searches on the Internet over the last 14 years, and each time it postgres has come ahead of MySQL in performance, reliability, ease of use etc. I did some DBA & Java programming in MySQL in one job, and have a client with MySQL.

No Ask.com toolbar, the option for online or offline installers as well a multitude of different platforms. I've NEVER, EVER downloaded Java anywhere else because of my habit of going to this site first (it's where you get the JDK after all).

I really wish more people knew about this. Seems like everyone prefers to whine rather than find a solution.

Ive found several benefits to removing Java 8 entirely.
1. budget performance: by reducing expenditures on support contracts and Oracle licensing fees my budget has stopped looking like a Syrian casualty report.
2. maintenance productivity: developers have stopped hurling themselves nude through my expensive plate glass windows as they wail 'exception access violation!' This frees up maintenance to address more urgent concerns.
3. Environmental impact: We've reduced out environmental footprint by shredding our tear-stained contracts, and mulching them with our ancient blood-soaked documentation to create a spreadable compost that just brings out the absolute best in the landscaping.
4. Wellness impact: Thanks to removing Java our datacenter now runs closer to the temperatures the CRACS were designed to endure. While common HR functions like the weekly jboss report run luau-themed weenie roast have unfortunately been ended, the number of sysops that survive provisioning has improved. Analysts are also no longer permitted to refer to the datacenter provisioning process as 'the trip to mordor'

1. budget performance: by reducing expenditures on support contracts and Oracle licensing fees my budget has stopped looking like a Syrian casualty report.

That sounds suspiciously like a complaint about Oracle's database product, not Java. No one in their right mind actually licenses Java stuff from Oracle, which is why Oracle constantly has shit-fits about it.

They should just ditch the browser plugin by default. Support it as 'legacy' for a version or two, but don't ship or install by default (hell, they could even only offer it to corporate customers for all I care). It's the biggest problem with Java -- otherwise you pretty well get what you expect if you download and run unknown code, no worse than any other language. It's not like C's ability to completely tear your operating system apart if you run code you don't know is a bug, after all.

Spot on. The Java browser plugin is the real life vector for getting pwned, not Java the language or the Java virtual machine. Malicious code written in C could do a lot worse with a lot less lines of code - it's just that we don't have browser plugins for running x86 code. Ok... with Google's NaCl, that may be changing!

If Oracle want to save Java's reputation they have to kill the browser plugin. Like you suggest, make it an optional legacy download and set a date for when it will be killed off completely.

Also, make it possible to upgrade without being Admin (in windows land). It's beyond fucking stupid you get prompted to enter the administrator password because java needs to update, 10 seconds later saying "update found click here to update", only to fail and make you log out, login as admin, and then fucking download it manually. christ, how fucking hard can it be? every other piece of software manages to update successfully from a standard account.

Yep. REST. Not an "object model" as you require, but who cares ? I can tranfer state to another place in the network, and never care in what language and on what OS the endpoint runs. I just get a behaviour guarantee, which is enough. For sure, I don't even know what code is running to service my GET or PUT call. So what ?

The problem with CORBA was that it took a greatly skilled programmer to understand and use it, let alone implement new functionality with it. REST ? Just put any 22-year old diplomand at

REST is stateless. Also (as far as I know), works over HTTP. Java is plenty more than a web server platform. CORBA in java would allow one to consume an out of process object/server written in, say, Visual Basic or Lisp for all it matters, statefully, whether local or remote (think perhaps, a running service, or an instance of a document editor).

So is Slashdot not capable of having any kind of informative conversation about one of the most commercially popular and long-lived everyday programming languages, because "Oracle, LOL" and "Java applets suck"?

Popped in here hoping to see some insightful discussion about the future of Java, to help inform my possible decision as to whether or not to spend a lot of time and effort becoming a Java developer. So far, sadly disappointed. Nothing but Java and Oracle jokes as old as the hills.

Then again, this is Slashdot. I don't know why I was expecting any kind of mature conversation about Java.

No kidding. I'd like to see the sort of syntax sugar that would cut the length of my classes source in half by generating setters and getters (perhaps via annotations like project Lombok does). There are a few other things of this sort that would vastly reduce the amount of boilerplate code.

In all seriousness I think part of it is due to the facts that one, Oracle is not expected to actually pay attention and two, if they do, it won't be here that they listen to. They have their own channels.

Not pretending to be a JAVA expert, but maybe the lack of good advice, seriousness, and positive comments IS YOUR ANSWER. Unless a lot of Java devs show up on Slashdot with positive comments -- maybe that should be an indicator; "I'm better off with JavaScript and OpenCL".

1) Should become a Java developer? Consider all the hate so many people project at Java. Do you think people just hate it because it's so great? You dont get respect if dont act respectable.2) Java keeps needlessly expanding and some parts get dropped.3) Java is not a long-lived everyday programming language. Java showed up about the mid 1990s. C has been going strong since the early 1970s. C++ was an extension of C that came around in the 1980s.3.1) How

Could you enlighten me please, what is your language of choice for your next big project? Php, perl maybe?
And I am talking about writing business logic, database access and soap communication.
I hate Oracle with passion (because of their database product and pricing),
but java (on servers, not some shitty applets) is in reality the only option when you want to write anything "business oriented".

1) How many of the people who reflexivly project hate at Java have solid, defensible reasons for doing so? Do you think people form opinions based on evidence and thoughtful consideration?

2) Examples, please.

3) Well C is not a long-lived programming language, then. COBOL, FORTRAN and LISP have been going strong since the 1950's!

3.1) Plenty. Most of the applications on my phone runs Java (Android). My cable box (OCAP). My Blu-ray player (BD-J). Several of the applications I administer or use professionally (IntelliJ, Confluence, Jira, Zimbra, JMeter).

Just because you don't see it doesn't mean you don't use it. And even if you don't use doesn't mean other people don't use it. Java is an incredible pervasive language in the embedded and server space.

3.2) And?

3.3) With a twelve year history, multiple implementations and no hint of a successor, this strikes me as needless fear-mongering. Microsoft is proprietary, not fickle. Most of their standards have excellent longevity and they have far longer support cycles for their products than most of the Unix world.

This is just a short anecdote, so it doesn't carry much weight, but in the last 20+ years I've been involved in many large projects, most of them successful, but it seems that the ones that turn into total nightmares failed because the JAVA teams messed up totally. So now I have a gag reflex when I'm presented with the prospect of working on a project with a large JAVA component.

That is because to justify the expense of being a large project they needlessly complicate the architecture of the program. Then it gets delayed and buggy like heck. Fact: 90% the things done with EJBs don't need them at all.

Well, I know the difference between the Enterprise Edition and applets, but the last time I did any work with Java EE was at the time EJB 2.0 was still new. All I can do is confirm that those interfaces required a lot of boilerplate to use: so much that we used JavaDoc plugins to generate the code for us. Someone told me that later Java EE versions are more usable, but I don't have personal experience with that; I spent the next few years doing a web app in Python instead.

The lack of mature commentary suggests that you stay away, if you care what Slashdot readers think. Reflect on that and become enlightened.

If you want help deciding whether to learn java, download eclipse and write hello world. If you don't immediately burn your house down to remove the taint of Satan's ide, maybe java is for you. Or Ask Slashdot, where you can be informed by the great geek collective about just how ignorantly neckbearded the idea is or isn't.Also, you smell like farts and your nose looks o

So is Slashdot not capable of having any kind of informative conversation about one of the most commercially popular and long-lived everyday programming languages, because "Oracle, LOL" and "Java applets suck"?

Let's try. As a Java developer (among other things), I can say that I don't really care about Java EE (i.e. the enterprise features like JPA, EJB3).

It works for certain types of software, but in my experience, once you hit a certain complexity, you'll run into things that can't be solved with standard Java EE.

Then you'll usually drop down to the vendor implementation (JPA->Hibernate, EJB3->JBoss/Glassfish or whatever), and start using features that are not really standard.

Since JavaEE is a server application standard, cutting old stuff means that you can no longer run apps that still use said older features on a newer JavaEE server. So, expect everyone to continue using the crusty, old versions of JBoss (for example) or to have the server manufacturers outright ignore Oracle's changes to JavaEE 8.

All I'm asking for in Java 8 is the integration of vectorization instructions in the jvm. Please, do something for that >10x time factor compared to C++ with a compiler using correctly SSE/AVX instructions. I know most of the business doesn't care, but for the few who are still doing some computationally intensive processing (unrelated to databases btw), it is a game changer.

Hopefully this will fall out nicely from the work they're doing on Sumatra/Graal. If they can generate independent streams of ALU work that suit GPU vector units they should be able to generate AVX/SSE code too. No need to concentrate on vectorising the entire application, which can be difficult given other aspects of the Java language, but just concentrate on using the stream APIs and related features that guarantee iteration independence.

Computationally intensive tasks have always been crap in Java. Non unsigned types, no support for fast floating point types, no vector instruction support, etc. I believe the DoD and DARPA even funded Sun Microsystems to extend Java for such applications once and they ended up developing a whole *new* language that went nowhere instead.

I've been programming in Java since it first came out, and I never had any particular problems with it, other than the fact that it's rather verbose. I've been thinking there must be a way to accomplish the same thing without so much boilerplate code. Then I discovered Scala [scala-lang.org] (which runs on the JVM and can easily integrate with existing Java libraries).

Mind you there are some things about Scala that are kinda weird, like so much optional syntax and type inferencing makes it sometimes hard to read. But I've been finding it a joy for new code I write, almost Java-like but much less verbose, plus you get the functional programming capabilities that Java lacks. Some of the library code that's out there is hard to understand because of the nature of the syntax, but after you study it a bit, it's not too bad.

I've been programming in Java since it first came out, and I never had any particular problems with it, other than the fact that it's rather verbose. I've been thinking there must be a way to accomplish the same thing without so much boilerplate code. Then I discovered Scala [scala-lang.org] (which runs on the JVM and can easily integrate with existing Java libraries).
Mind you there are some things about Scala that are kinda weird, like so much optional syntax and type inferencing makes it sometimes hard to read. But I've been finding it a joy for new code I write, almost Java-like but much less verbose, plus you get the functional programming capabilities that Java lacks. Some of the library code that's out there is hard to understand because of the nature of the syntax, but after you study it a bit, it's not too bad.

For those of us old enough to remember, Java is, in fact, the new COBOL. COBOL, like Java, was the language of choice for software engineers of a bygone era (the 1970's), and suffered from a similar verbosity, clumsy syntax, and prevalence of boiler-plate code (substitute copylibs for jars and you are halfway there). I wrote COBOL for a living for decades and never, ever, coded most of the mandatory code sections.

When I was engaged in my first enterprise level Java project (a JBoss app), I was amazed at

My Darling Oracle,Please add as many bells and whistles as you can, throw in all the experimental features that are poorly tested and don't worry about security. If you would be so kind to do this, everyone would finally agree to uninstall Java and never ever use it again. You have sabotaged all the other things you have bought so why not Java? Come on, you know you want to.

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